Spouse(s) Mary May Peabody | ||
Born August 16, 1897 ( 1897-08-16 ) Delhi, Ontario Known for Elizabethan literary puzzles Died 16 November 1992, North Branford, Connecticut, United States Education Harvard University (1923), Yale University Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Employers Harvard University, Yale University, Haverford College Books The death of Christoph, Shakespeare versus Shallow, The Commonwealth and Rest, first night of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's motley Similar Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Shakespeare, Drew Gilpin Faust, John Sexton | ||
John Leslie Hotson, commonly known as Leslie Hotson or J. Leslie Hotson (16 August 1897 – 16 November 1992) was a scholar of Elizabethan literary puzzles.
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Biography
He was born at Delhi, Ontario, on 16 August 1897. He studied at Harvard University, where he obtained a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. He went on to hold a number of academic posts.
Hotson was known for his tenacious archival research and his interest in coded information. He had a number of notable successes, but not all of his "decodings" have been accepted by other scholars. He discovered the identity of Ingram Frizer, the killer of Christopher Marlowe, and reconstructed the shape of the original Shakespearean theater. He also unearthed the letters that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote to his divorced wife Harriet; produced evidence of Shakespeare's father as a wool dealer; illuminated Shakespeare's early years in Stratford-upon-Avon; and identified John Day as the killer of Henry Porter, a minor Elizabethan dramatist.
Some of his solutions to literary puzzles are still in dispute. He claimed to have identified one Nicholas Colfox as the murderer of Thomas of Woodstock by "decoding" Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale. He also claimed to have identified Mr W H, the person to whom Shakespeare's sonnets were dedicated, as a William Hatcliffe of Lincolnshire. He later argued that a miniature colour portrait by Nicholas Hilliard depicted Shakespeare as a young man. As the New York Times stated in his obituary: "it was chiefly as a Shakespearian detective that Dr Hotson remained in the public eye, sometimes to the annoyance of rival scholars who discounted his theories."
His first major work, The Death of Christopher Marlowe — which made his name — is still in print. He stumbled across the evidence while decoding Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale in the archives of the English Public Records Office in 1923–24.
He died on 16 November 1992 in North Branford, Connecticut.